Heart of Darkness

So many words have been written about this book over the years. But I have only just read it, so my thoughts are fresh - to me - , if not new. Having recently read the dystopian MaddAddam,one  of my reactions reading this was, it is not as graphic as the same book written today would be. The evil is hinted at, the suffering of the Africans forced to work for the colonialists is only sketched in. But in my view the horror is all the darker for that.

One way of thinking about the book is that it depicts a man's journey into his own soul, by journeying towards, first physically and then in understanding, another man, Mr Kurtz. And the ultimate revelation is that what lies within a person is "the horror, the horror"... The great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe spoke out against Conrad and this book, criticising it at one point for using Africa and the exploitation and suffering of Africans, as a mere backdrop for the story of the mental collapse of a petty white man. It is true that the Congolese people are kept very much in the background, their behaviour seems parodied, they appear out of the forest on the river banks almost as a wallpaper for the journey. And they are called savages and so on. There is some truth in Achebe's criticism. But on the other hand, I wouldn't say this is the story of the collapse of one white man - it is a description of the collapse into madness, futility, and evil, of all the white people involved - and Conrad does seem to link this to the whole evil of colonialism and the wickedness of using its people, stealing from them, stripping the Congo of its resources using the very sweat and blood of the Congolese people to do it. It is really the story of the fall into evil of the whole human race. But the Congolese people are not being blamed, they are the victims, and so they do appear as the props. And clearly Conrad didn't have much understanding of them.

It is true the Congolese people in the book are dehumanised, except for one or two glimpses of genuine interaction - such as at the helmsman's very moment of death - and that is sad, and leaves the book feeling dated. I felt the same reading Graham Green's The Heart of the Matter, where there are no African people included in the story at all. But Conrad was writing at the end of the colonial period and he was writing to show the evils of the colonial enterprise, not condoning it. He objects manifestly to the ignorance and self-seeking greed of the various agents and station managers his character Marlow encounters. He seems to prefer Kurtz's complete madness to their hypocrisy and stupidity, which is why Marlow sides with Kurtz in the end. I would see the book as a step in the right direction, a first awakening to what was going on in the "Scramble for Africa".

Conrad ends the book with the none-too-subtle message that the heart of darkness is not in far off "uncivilised" places, but just around the next bend of the river,  - for all of us.

This made me wonder about our capacity for evil, again. As Christians we know the source of light, and He is real to us. And I said in my recent post on this, that we have the responsibility of being that light to other people. But still sometimes I am touched by fingers of that darkness, that sense of horror at the heart of it all, even hints of despair. When the evil that goes on seems too much, too prevalent. When the news shows young blood-covered Syrian men lying in hospital, no living relatives left, no solution to the fighting, the beautiful Syrian cities shot and bombed to rubble. When fighting in south Sudan goes on, and on. When the flood waters damaging our farms, homes and churches sit and sit and sit, and it still rains and rains. When I then think of Bangladesh flooding worse than this every year...

Is the human race a messy, selfish disaster, and our world a ruined, warming planet heading inevitably to its man-made end?

That would be one way of looking at it.

Another way is that God made our world, and made us, male and female, in his image. When he made it, it was all good (Genesis 1). When we messed up, he sent his son to show us the right way to go about life (John 3:16). And at the same time, to give us a way to be saved from our own personal particular sins. And he also sent his Spirit to be in us, to give us the strength and ability to live right. And he also promises that he will return to reign on earth, and that then the evil and all the pain will be No More. This painful, sometimes dark time, is the grace period God has allowed us, for as many as possible to get to know him. Also, the world is not hurtling downward to disaster and ruin like a run-away train. It may be heading towards its end, but, only at the pace and timing allowed by God, and under his control.

That gives me a lot of hope to hold onto. And we do need hope.